Gavin Newsom is as Bad as Trump

The Trump Administration is notoriously good at appealing to popular demands, except for when these popular demands act against the Administration’s interests. Where Trump meets with public opposition, he resorts to the familiar face of bureaucratic censorship which he so vehemently condemned. It is clear that Trump’s avowal of freedom is a contingent avowal, that he defends freedom, the free markets, and economic meritocracy, only insofar as the markets work in his favour. In this sense, Trump is not (economically) vastly different from his globalist, Democratic opposition: when obscure and precarious financial practices are threatened by the volatility of the free market, bank bailouts, the Federal Reserve, or State intervention are inevitably relied on for support. It is in other words clear that Trump is a threat to the same grassroots Republicanism on behalf of which he was elected.

But with the protests taking place in California, a new opposition is emerging: the core of the problem is not only with Trump but also with the side that opposes Trump. Mass protests in Los Angeles continue in the wake of the largest mass deportation in US history, which has targeted even those migrants with legitimate documentation, and Trump having authorised the mobilisation of 2000 National Guard troops in the city. Trump’s federal intervention is claimed to have “unlawfully” bypassed the Californian State’s usual regulation of National Guards, prompting Gavin Newsom to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration that is still undecided. Newsom’s push against the brutal recklessness of Trump’s mass deportation tactics is now placing him as the centrepiece of a Democratic opposition to Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tone. In doing so, the California Governor would appear to embody the liberal values of inclusion, social justice, global welfare et cetera.

The problem, however, is with the performative nature of Newsom’s reaction: Newsom simply rebrands the same ignorance of the cause of the migration problem that Trump displays. Of course, the Republican tactic of mass deportation and anti-migration policies inevitably only serves to reinforce the global economic tensions that produce a migration crisis in the first place. And yet on the other hand, an empty Democratic or liberal openness to migration leads to the exact same antagonisms that furnish protectionist, proto-authoritarian reactions. The same unfounded framing of the migration crisis provided by Trump is mirrored in Newsom’s gestural opposition, which does little more than insinuate that Trump